Start spreading the romance

Oslo Davis

''Chapter one. He adored New York City … He romanticised it all out of proportion. To him … this was still a town that existed in black and white and pulsated to the great tunes of George Gershwin.'' Uh … no. Let me start this over. ''Chapter one. He was too romantic about Manhattan, as he was about everything else.'' - opening monologue to Woody Allen's Manhattan.

I'VE spent a good part of this year creating a short animation titled Melbhattan, a pastiche of the opening three-minute, 44-second montage of Woody Allen's 1979 film Manhattan created from drawings of Melbourne.

It's not really my bag to do sentimental, so for Melbhattan I set out to ridicule the sizeable proportion of inner-city Melburnians who think our city is a mini-Manhattan. But after making it, I realised I may have made something romantic after all - and I don't feel nearly as dirty as I thought I would.

I first saw Manhattan in 1987, when I was 15. The film was the first black-and-white movie screened on my parents' colour Sanyo.

On the big screen, cinematographer Gordon Willis' rich black-and-white opening montage is epic. From the initial clarinet glissando of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, the viewer is hurried through 61 shots of New York: street-smart guys and beautiful women, construction sites, harbour ferries, market vendors, Upper East Side school kids tumbling out of class, the Lincoln Centre, Yankee Stadium, Radio City and Times Square at night, and a collection of out-of-this-world long shots over Central Park as the sun sets behind the skyscrapers. By the time the Fourth of July fireworks bring the introduction to a close, you're fully sated and ready to go home.

If this opening is Woody Allen romanticising Manhattan all out of proportion, the rest of the film is him back on earth, merrily mocking the foibles of a select group of educated, neurotic sophisticates as they schmooze at Upper West Side parties and cheat on their partners. In The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik wrote how the realism of Manhattan ''unleashed Woody Allen's honesty'' and, for me as a kid, this honesty - wrapped up in comedy - taught me the valuable lesson that jokes and, later, cartoons could be used both to charm and roast the posers.

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The idea that Melbourne is an antipodean Manhattan is not a new one, but after my wife and I returned from a stint in Tokyo, Melbourne seemed more New Yorkery than ever. It was 2003 and the people here seemed pushier, richer and crankier. More ''whatyatalkingabout?!'' and less ''excuse me''.

Everyone was banging on about how the cultural capital of Australia was also the most liveable city in the world. The Brooklyn hipster movement was taking hold in Collingwood. People were only half joking when they called the areas north and south of Johnston Street NoJo and SoJo, and developers began building an ''Upper West Side'' on King Street and flogging ''New York-style studio apartments'' in Flinders Lane.

Former Melbourne Writers Festival director Steve Grimwade, who made The New Yorker magazine a focus of this year's festival, said on independentaustralia.net that ''Melburnians have looked … to places they can aspire to be like and, in many ways, New York is [that] city … ''

I liked this (conscious or not) aspiration to be a type of New York, but as a cartoonist I had an obligation to keep that romanticism in check. It was this thinking that inspired me to cast Melbourne as New York in the style of Woody's Manhattan, to both charm and roast without being mean.

I began making Melbhattan by printing out every shot of Manhattan's opening montage and then scouted Melbourne for comparable locations. I photographed the MCG from the Sofitel toilets at night to evoke Yankee Stadium, and snapped the central business district from the top of the Shrine of Remembrance over the trees of the Royal Botanic Gardens to mimic Willis' long shots over Central Park. Prada on Collins Street was Bloomingdales, Readings in Carlton a Chinatown grocery, and the Manchester Unity Building was any neo-Gothic building on Broadway.

I was beginning to see Melbourne with a cinematographer's eye, and it looked pretty good.

I then drew each scene using a fine-tipped pen before applying ink wash and assembling the 61 frames on a computer. The moving bits - a car passing, someone walking their dog through Fitzroy Gardens - were animated in jumpy steps of three or four.

Gershwin, speaking of how he conceived Rhapsody in Blue in 1924, said he ''heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness''.

Biddy Connor, a local composer, took on the task of making the music for Melbhattan, a new soundtrack for Melbourne, just as Rhapsody has become for New York. Like me, Biddy tried, in vain, to keep the romanticism of the original from infecting our attempts at parody.

After finishing Manhattan, Woody was so unhappy with it he asked the studio not to release it and offered to make a film free of charge instead.

''The idea in the mind's eye is so wonderful, and you fantasise it in the perfect flash of a second,'' he said in an interview in The Paris Review. ''But then when you have to execute it, it doesn't come out as you'd fantasised.''

My Melbhattan became a battle to keep the work aligned to that initial, perfect one-second flash of an idea - a good-natured ribbing. But in its place grew something else: a nervy, twitchy animation that shows that perhaps I am a little too romantic about Melbourne, even though I try not to be about almost everything else.

■ Melbhattan screens before every Rooftop Cinema film in December, and online at melbhattan.com from mid-December.